


Requiem

by witticaster



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Found Family Vibes, Gen, I remember nothing about dragon age lore and am just here to have fun please forgive me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:09:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23638090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witticaster/pseuds/witticaster
Summary: Maevaris smiles. "Talking to Halward Pavus about kindness seems like trying to explain theology to a varghest. But by all means, it’s your commutatus.”A very anti-Halward take on David Gaider's "The Final Conversation."
Relationships: Dorian Pavus & Maevaris Tilani
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Requiem

**Author's Note:**

> so! this is a gift for a dear friend whose genius can be found here: https://teryster.tumblr.com/
> 
> I read David Gaider's unofficial Dorian's Last Talk with His Dad story (https://medium.com/@davidgaider/the-final-conversation-d6258fa6cbdb), and while I'm a fan in concept, I just can't deal with Halward at all, so this is part 1 of my spiteful remix

In Minrathous, funerals are the social highlights of the year.

The calendar is studded with anniversaries and gods’ days and tourneys, all of which are planned a decade in advance and perfected as the months inch closer. For this reason, Minrathous had been designed to be a blank slate; the bare walls haven’t seen the sun in centuries. Fresh tapestries change in and out by the week. If you know your holidays well enough, you have no need to ask anyone of the day.

Death, however, comes unexpectedly. It’s a chance to show off one’s spontaneous style and illiquid assets. If you can assemble something beyond a little reception held in a lesser shrine, every table covered in desperate silk cloths, it says a lot about if the corpse in question is worth mourning.

Halward Pavus’s body is being interred at the Aemilian Cathedral.

Dorian had known that his father had been one of the Archon’s favorites, but in truth, he hadn’t expected the inconvenience of this honor. The Aemilian is reserved for the bodies of Archons and Black Divines, not magistri. Oh, he can recall a few crusty names he’d learned from the books, odd and exceptional senators who had done things so spectacular that they’d earned a gilded tomb.

The fact that Dorian can’t think of anything particularly spectacular before his death makes his stomach turn.

Luckily, he doesn’t have the time to pay attention to his own queasiness, because he’s very late. He should’ve been in Minrathous hours ago, with enough time to shave and change into something other than travelling leathers, but being stopped and almost robbed three times by highwaymen will tend to sponge up some time. It hadn’t been a long battle, but it had taken a while for his mount to settle. If he’d been just a tad wiser and accepted the steady chestnut mare that was offered to him, perhaps he would’ve been more punctual, but no, he’d chosen the Bog Unicorn.

It had seemed like a cheeky, clever idea at the time, but as Dorian trots along the outer streets of Minrathous on a towering undead horse with a sword speared through her head, he questions his past self. The outer corridors are reserved for Soporati merchants. They look at Dorian with wary, cataloging eyes, glancing from him to the black tapestries on the sandstone walls. They speak to each other in thin whispers. Most of them sell spices, fabric, fine soaps and perfumes. All of them sell information. All of them will, no doubt, be selling his entrance to someone before the day is out.

He urges his mount to tread a little faster. He hasn’t been out of Minrathous long enough to have forgotten his old shortcuts; instead of following the main street through the residential corridors, he turns sideways and goes through the butchers’ block to save himself five minutes.

He rides through a thick blanket of stenches: blood and rotting flesh, sweat and shit, all laced with the incense that butchers are required by law to burn outside of their shops.

It’s when Dorian is riding by an upturned sheep’s carcass, skin peeled off, shining and marbled red and white from fat and muscle, that he hears his name. Not called, not even spoken. It’s inferred into the air.

“Pavus.”

It’s a young girl, no older than eight, changing out a pail filled with the sheep’s blood with an empty one for it to drip into. She says it to an older woman: she turns to the girl with a hard scowl.

“Inside. You look an altus in the eye again and I’ll bleed you, instead.” While the woman humbly ducks her head in Dorian’s direction, the girl’s mouth goes thin, and she goes back into the shop as quick as she can while lugging her bucket of blood. It spills onto her dress.

Before he can figure out the right way to word the awful feeling growing through his insides like thick lichen, his father’s ghost presses against his eyes. He pulls his collar up and goes even faster, making people milling in the street scamper sideways at the sound of hoofbeats. _Sorry_ springs past the crust of his throat and onto his tongue, but he doesn’t let it out. He has enough of a survival instinct not to add on to all of the reasons why he shouldn’t be taking his father’s seat in the Magesterium.

He can just hear a long, thin mourning song as he moves from the utilitarian outer districts and into the heart of the city. Here, the ancient buildings have been taxidermized: stones and grout from eight centuries past still stand, veins of lyrium snaking through the unstable sections. Outside of here, buildings can be patched and reconstructed, but there are entire committees dedicated to making sure everyone can remember exactly how old the Tevinter Imperium is, and exactly how much it’s not going away any time soon.

In his younger days, Dorian had assisted a few of them in preservation efforts. He’d watched chunks of the treasury poured into the lyrium trade to make sure that an archive building stayed up, he’d been thrilled to see the repairs in action. He’d stood in the streets and felt the magical energy buzzing in his bones, the old skeletons of history kept strong with loving maintenance. He’d ran his fingers along walls that had been built before his family tree had taken root, then smiled when his fingers hit a chunk of luminescent blue. He’d thrown up behind the senate chambers when he learned that the lyrium was kept charged with blood sacrifices.

The streets are smeared with the hot yolk of the sun.

The funeral tapestries become finer and more frequent: these are heavily embroidered with golden thread to weight the edges, with variations of the Pavus crest. It’s a mass of warped golden tendrils. When he was very young, Dorian had once asked his father what they were, snake tails or licks of flame or something else. His father hadn’t responded, and when Dorian had suggested that perhaps they were a suggestion that the Pavuses were overly fond of tentacles, his mother had slapped him.

He realizes, as he turns the corner onto the city’s square, that he can’t hear the mourning song anymore.

“Shit.”

The Bog Unicorn, mercifully, recognizes his tone of voice and doesn’t resist when he urges her into a gallop. There are fewer faces on the street; people who would normally be promenading through the wide streets and luxuriously examining fabric are all in the Aemilian Cathedral, which looms straight ahead of him, blocked only by the entrant garden filled with fountains and blood lotuses. Dorian is struck with the harsh impulse to send his mount galloping through the garden, trampling the place into a mash of damp pink blossoms, but he resists and sends her around the side. He hates the sweet rush of wind through his hair, but realizes at this point, looking more disheveled will at least show a commitment to his idiosyncrasies.

It’s sort of a shame that no one is looking at him right now. He imagines the image he’s making is a good one.

The only spectators are the valet and the cathedral guards; he dismounts before the Bog Unicorn has fully stopped, tries to make his landing look a bit graceful, and leads his mount to the valet. He’s a young elven man in a black uniform who looks extremely uncomfortable when Dorian holds out the reigns.

“If possible, you might want to keep her away from the other mounts,” says Dorian, breathing too hard given that all he’s been doing for the past two hours is riding. “I’m not sure how they’ll all react to the situation.”

The valet just looks at him for a few precious seconds, but takes the reigns and clicks his tongue at her, softly.

The Bog Unicorn is unflappable as always, but she turns her head to look at Dorian. Her eyes are without pupils, just a film covering shifting, milky shapes. She doesn’t snort or stomp or shake her mane, she just looks at him, her bony face thrown into terrible contrast in the afternoon light.

Dorian hears a low drum beat sound from the belly of the cathedral, rising through the rafters.

He pats his cloak pockets and finds three silvers. “Sorry, this is all I have on me.”

The valet looks more concerned at the tip than at the undead horse he’s been charged with. For just a moment, Dorian is back in Ferelden and trying to remember if he has anything else to give in his pack. The drum sounds again and he’s back in Tevinter, offering an enslaved man some money.

He wets his lips, his tongue pushing back a tag of dead skin. “You don’t have to take it if it’ll cause you trouble,” he says, “but if you want-”

The man takes the coins and stashes it in his pocket so quickly that Dorian only notices that his hand feels lighter. “I’ll find a good place for your mount, Magister.”

“No, I’m not-”

The sound of the drum.

Dorian nods at the man. “Thank you.”

He takes the steps two at a time, and arrives at the top step before the next drumbeat. The two guards look at him passively, no respect, no disrespect. The one on the right takes a step forward.

Dorian reaches for his neck, his fingers slipping on the sheen of sweat on his skin, and pulls a chain from his collar. He presents it to the Aemilian (or, the enchantment barring uninvited guests from the Aemilian, but the latter wording is much more evocative). The doors open.

He’s never seen the place so fashionably dismal. The cathedral has always been dark, with windows up high on the walls, more to let in air than light, casting eerie shadows on the vaults of the ceiling. Even those are covered with dark swags of gauze, which trail down the walls, floating over the engravings of ancient saints which jut out of the limestone. Every pillar wears a curtain of gold. There nave is absent its regular benches for the congregation: when the funeral is over, there will be a reception-cum-soiree here. Tables line the walls on either side, overloaded with wines, quail eggs, boiled peacock eyes, cuts of veal, mounds of black ants coated in glistening dark chocolate.

The drumming grows louder, issuing from a little out-of-the-way staircase which yawns black and open, exhaling cold air from underground.

“I expected you either earlier or later.”

Dorian says some words he shouldn’t say in a church as Maevaris emerges from behind a column, laughing.

“Glad to see you, too,” she says. She is beautiful, dressed in an avant-garde wrap of silk, and a towering headdress which makes her loom taller than her stately six feet.

“Have I missed it?”

“You are missing it,” she corrects. “The consecration is nearly over, and I realized that I should expect you to come at just the wrong time. I slipped out to avoid the crowd and, well, fortify myself.” She raises a golden chalice. “Your mother only ordered mulsum. Sickly stuff. I trust you’ll make better decisions as the head of house.” But she finishes her cup.

“I should go down.”

“What a terrible idea,” says Maevaris. “Better to linger here with me. We’ll go down when the perfumed masses are gone. Besides, I’m desperate to hear about your little adventure in Orlais. How is the dear Inquisitor?”

Dorian uses the nearby drapery to wipe sweat from his forehead. He’d instructed himself to focus on the goal of burning the gangrene out of his own homeland, rather than stopping the oncoming apocalypse wrought by an old god. It's hard to say which sounds more impossible.

Maevaris gives him a few seconds, then saves him: “Did you give my love to the Commander? And did he send his in return?”

“You’re wasting your time,” says Dorian. “He has a dog now. By southern standards, that means his heart is eternally out of reach.”

She tips her cup upside-down to see that nothing is left. “I can dream.”

The drumming softens into a thin, constant rumble, like an ocean wave, before it ceases. Whispers of old words gasp out of the crypt. Only a few moments, now.”

“Maevaris,” says Dorian, “you know you don’t have to do this.”

“Don’t I? Excellent. I’ll see you outside, then.”

“Please be nice to me on this, of all days.”

“Kindness kills you faster than anything.” Maevaris snaps her fan open, making vast cuts: great, exaggerated movements, as is the custom in Tevinter. So many people in so many elaborate costumes necessitate some way to maintain personal space, which was only won through carving out the air around you. Maevaris is always particularly aggressive about buying herself room.

“Shall I tell him that?” asks Dorian.

“There are a few things I’d have you tell him, first. Places he can go. Things he can do to himself." Maevaris smiles. "Talking to Halward Pavus about kindness seems like trying to explain theology to a varghest. But by all means, it’s your _commutatus_.”

Dorian shushes her compulsively, and she laughs.

The _commutatus ultima_ is only as taboo as anything else in Tevinter, but while Maevaris has made her name out of broken taboos, Dorian has preserved his by keeping them. It is especially important now, as a known Southern collaborator and Lucerni party member, come to claim his father’s seat, that he maintain public respect. Especially about this.

The ritual casting itself is of no concern: he’s studied it in anticipation of this day, although he did expect it to be a lot longer off in coming. It’s simple necromancy, the same way he might animate any corpse. The trick is summoning the spirit in such a way that one can, as the name promises, hold a final conversation. It’s a trick that takes blood magic.

A little current of air from Maevaris’s fan slides across his face. “Secret yourself,” she says, “I hear them.”

He tucks himself into an alcove nearby, and watches as Maevaris slides across the nave to retrieve two more cups of wine. When the first attendee emerges from the crypt – a man Dorian recognizes as one of her key opponents on the senate floor – she smiles, bows her head, and offers both cups to him, saying she knows how much he likes his spirits.

It’s a ritual she repeats again with every new face, negotiating bowing and air-kissing with ease. Dorian never quite mastered it in the way he should. Spectacle, he can manage: but plotted spectacle, useful spectacle, is still something he hopes to learn. It’s something he must learn, if he hopes to do anything with himself in this wretched place.

She returns, tilting her head towards the door. He will go first: she will follow to cover him. He’s turning into the dank air below when he feels a hand on his arm.

“Shameful.” It’s his mother’s voice.

Dorian glances over his shoulder to see if anyone has noticed them, but his mother chose her moment well. A string quartet has just struck up a waltz in the minor key, and everyone is attending, listening for mistakes.

“I was delayed,” he says. “I’m sorry, Mother.”

Her face is obscured by a jeweled veil. It’s custom for the spouse to cover themselves entirely for the funeral, but this tradition is usually one which practicality overrules. It’s stifling to be wrapped up so during the daytime. His mother must be boiling herself alive, but there’s no denying that people will speak of her devotion for years to come.

“You are absent the burial,” she says, “but think to claim the final words. Every day, you make it a trial for me to call you my son.”

Maevaris joins them. “Aquinea, your guests. Save your words for the appropriate time. We will discuss later.”

His mother tightens her hold. “We,” she says, into Dorian’s ear. “Do not tell me you shame me further by taking Tilani to do this.”

His father’s threat was always neglect, while his mother’s has always been her full attention. Truly, they are a perfect pair. Were.

“It will only be an embarrassment,” says Maevaris, “if you draw attention. I _will_ accompany Dorian. Whether anyone else knows that is up to you.”

Dorian searches the veil for where he imagines her eyes would be. He looks more like his father than his mother, whose face is filled with more dramatic contrast. Everyone used to remark on the affinity between father and son, which made it easy to imagine his mother as alien, unrelated. She still wears her Thalrassian medallion under her collar. She once told him that she wanted to name him after her own father. Perhaps she should’ve.

“I never knew the depths of Halward’s foolishness until now,” she says. “Go, then. See what he has to say to you. See if he’s proud to bestow his name on the man most determined to degenerate it beyond recognition.”

As quickly as she took his arm, she releases him.

Maevaris has to push him down the stairs, hissing at him to quiet his footfalls. When they reach the last step, she fans him, even though the air is cold. “I should’ve seen her coming. Sneaky minx, that one.”

“Not your fault.”

“Are you alright?”

That makes him smile. He jerks his head towards the burial chambers.

The walls are built of mortar and bones: skulls and scapulas packed together like cobblestones. There’s no consensus about where these bones came from. The preferred myth is that they’re the bones of Darinius’s favorite soldiers, who fell while expanding the empire. Whoever they were, they grin at Dorian now, or beckon with stranded, lonely fingers.

“What will you talk about?” asks Maevaris.

“I’m hoping that’ll come to me,” says Dorian. “I believe the death of success is over-preparing. Besides, I expect he’ll be the one to decide that.”

“Oh, please, Dorian. He dominated you in life, don’t let him dominate you in death, too.”

“Do you have any ideas?” If it were anyone else, he’d apologize for his sharpness, but Maevaris knows him too well. An apology would insult her.

“A few. The classical approach is one of interrogation: to ask after the nature of his death, his wishes for the future, and how he would like to be spoken of in times to come. I’ve heard of some people trying to blackmail their relatives into revealing certain information. You know, tell me where the what-have-you is, or I’ll tell everyone about you and your second cousin what’s-his-name, regardless of whether it’s true or not. But that’s not exactly your style.”

She fans away a few cobwebs before they pass into a narrower tunnel, which forces Dorian to take the lead. Maevaris’s headdress scrapes against the tunnel ceiling. It must’ve been difficult to herd so many guests in and out; he spies stray glitter and gilding which scraped up against the tunnel walls. Maevaris bumps into him more than once.

“Ugh,” she says, “the smell of you!”

“Essence of Minrathous.”

They enter the cavernous burial chamber before he’s ready. His father’s body shimmers on the altar.

Dorian is horrified by his lack of horror.

His father isn’t really dead yet – not in the permanent way, at least. There’s life in the old man yet, one conversation still to be had. His father is asleep. In completing the ritual, Dorian’s truly killing his father, erasing any future for him. The execution of potential seems like a more ghastly crime than the real murderer could’ve ever committed.

“You know,” says Maevaris. “You don’t have to do this, either. No one will know. And you’ve already gotten the pleasure of annoying your mother.”

He reaches out long before he’s in range to touch his father’s clothes. He looks like a sleeping regent from some old tale. The robes are cold, stiff with embroidery. “Do you want to help me, or don’t you?”

“I always want to help you,” says Maevaris. “I’m not convinced that that’s what I’m doing right now.”

“Neither am I,” says Dorian.

The spell is as simple as he predicted, made easier by the lyrium buzzing in every wall around him. Sigils this old are easy to remember, calling on the primordial form of magic: dangerous stuff, not sophisticated enough to be predictable, but powerful beyond anything made in the modern age. The words are not difficult, either. He’s always thought they sounded like a nursery rhyme.

He reaches the end. He should spill his own blood now.

He turns to Maevaris.

She is already holding the knife aloft, having watched his every move. “I never said goodbye to my father,” she says. “I loved him—very much. More than I’ll allow myself to admit. If I’d had my chance, I wouldn’t have asked him any of the proper questions. I wouldn’t have asked him what he wanted. I wouldn’t have asked him anything. One’s life, I think, should express itself on its own.”

She cuts her palm, stifling her grunt. She’s not as practiced a blood mage as anyone upstairs, but she knows more than enough to siphon her blood into his spell.

“I’ll be outside when you need me,” she says. “Remember, you don’t have long.” She retreats down the tunnel.

The shimmer peels away from his father’s body in rivulets, like rain racing along glass. His face is as placid in death as it was in life, and the expression is still inert even when charged with Dorian’s spell and Maevaris’s blood.

His father’s mouth falls open.

It is correct, Dorian knows, to say _Salve, Pater. Tu exaudies me?_

He says nothing. He wonders if he chooses not to, or if he cannot.

He hears his father’s voice from unmoving lips: “Will you not greet me, Dorian?”

**Author's Note:**

> well look at that, you're at the end of the first half of this weird thing! 
> 
> if you had a nice time, I would be SO happy if you would check out the aforementioned Tery's stuff. she's a fabulous artist and even better person, and the reason I posted this. if you're able, I would be impossibly happier if you slid her a ko-fi or checked out her patreon, because one of my life goals is to make sure she can keep making cool stuff
> 
> otherwise, make sure you take care of yourself today, friend


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